In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

some subset of people has taken on the role of defining and shaping the work to be done. When this goes poorly, we get tyrants, demagogues,

civil servants, politicians and advisers should never believe anything the system claims unless it has been checked first-hand, whether in a local school, business or GP surgery. Sitting in an office and relying on papers and emails guarantees a distorted view. Reality and representation are rarely identical.